A Definitive Henry V on Our
Shores

While we are having a Bi-centennial, Britain's Royal
Shakespeare Company is enjoying its centennial. What could be more appropriate
than this distinguished company's visiting us, albeit briefly, for a sort of
hands-across-the-sea celebration. For, after all, Shakespeare is America's
great national dramatist as well as Britain's, and while we may be split by an
ocean and have had a certain temporary disagreement over taxes, we are at least
irrevocably bound by a language that found its fullest flower in
Shakespeare.

Last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, we were
given the RSC's definitive staging of Henry V, which may well be to
history what Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream was to romance.
Definitive? Well, in the plundered and disputed world of Shakespearean
production nothing is definitive, but undeniably Terry Hands's direction of
this complex and heroic play, with Alan Howard as Henry giving what is the
finest performance of his very considerable career, will leave an indelible
mark on the play. Here is a Henry as patriot, dreamer, scholar, soldier, lover.
It is a Henry who has developed from the wayward but strangely knowing Prince
Hal who wandered like a spring breeze with cold currents through the two
earlier plays Henry IV, Part I, and Henry IV, Part II. And
thereby hangs a tale.

When this Henry V was first staged last year
for the company's centennial (Yes, it was actually 1975 - but every journalist
occasionally white-lies in his first paragraph for effect), it was envisaged as
part of the complete trilogy starting with the two parts of Henry IV and
ending with this production. As a trilogy it proved wonderfully successful when
I saw it in England - but unfortunately such is the poverty, artistic poverty
at least, of our two respective nations that it proved too expensive to bring
the three plays over, so we must be content with one - this Henry
Sampler.

I mention this because it is perhaps a little
difficult to see the full brilliance of this production, or of Mr. Howard's
tensely eloquent portrayal, out of their context. Mr. Hands is an
extraordinarily clever director. He has understood that this particular trilogy
is very political in its import. So we must comprehend Shakespeare's view of
kingship and patriotism not merely through the eyes of living history - a
Holinshed chronicle come to life - but also through eyes, ears and minds
dominated by the Elizabethan world picture. Shakespeare was a court poet -
indeed, in those days the only other alternative for a poet was
prison.

At one time it was fashionable to denigrate
Shakespeare's history plays - to regard them as of less weight than the
tragedies, of less poetic value than the romances and of less gossamer charm
than the comedies. This view no longer holds. A play such as Henry V,
with its warring politics, its constant interchange of character and its cast
and panoramic view of a lost England, is anything but negligible. Indeed in its
sheer juxtaposition of people, or in its multiplicity of incidents, even more,
in the development of Henry the patriot king, it has a depth of texture not
many of the other plays in the Shakespearean canon possess.

In Henry V Shakespeare made the fullest use of
the mystery and mechanism of the theater. The very idea of the figure of the
Chorus coming on and, insidiously, asking the audience to use its imagination
to see the sound and fury of battle, the knights and soldiers, the courts and
palaces, shrewdly sums up the very image and method of the basic theater. Mr.
Hands, and his fascinating designer Farrah, use this histrionic sleight of hand
as the starting point of the play - and also as a consistent way of keeping the
wary distance of history between Shakespeare's morals and our own.

The play opens on a gray stage. Music and lighting
platforms flank the bare arena. Actors are walking around in civilian clothes,
chatting, exercising, glancing curiously at the audience. The lights go down -
the Chorus takes over. It is Emrys James, funny, urbane and somehow looking a
little like Bertolt Brecht - and, in the Brechtian sense, alienated. The envoy
of France enters in 15th-century court dress. The drab floorcloth rises to
offer a shining canopy full of bright heraldry with British lions and French
fleur de lys, and slowly the other actors dress up for the play - except for
Mr. James, who remains wandering the play in his street clothes maintaining a
link with today.

Mr. Hands and Mr. Farrah - to say nothing of Stewart
Leviton's lighting and the music of Guy Woolfenden - provide the arena and the
framework of an interpretation. An area in which the actors can move with a
great deal of freedom. Of late, I think it is by now no secret, the RSC, under
its artistic director Trevor Nunn, has been moving into a freer and more
creative relationship between the director and the actors, so while the dense
context and reverberating historical images of the play unquestionably belong
to Mr. Hands, who has also coordinated the performance, the actors have also
left their mark.

Mr. Howard's Henry is triumphant. The voice is blunt,
almost abrasive, but almost shivers with passion, the face hard and boyish by
turn, the stance awkward and yet commanding, he throws away lines like
fragments of domestic poetry, but everything is encrusted with meaning yet
executed with simplicity. In the middle of the Crispin's day speech, he calmly
takes a 20-second pause and ends with his back to the audience. Such chances -
when they work - are heroic.

The rest all deserve mention and they cannot have any
in the brief traffic of a daily notice - I should have mentioned, of course,
the great Mr. James, Tim Wylton, Richard Moore, Jeffrey Dench, Trevor Peacock
and Oliver Ford-Davies, but I cannot. Our thanks must be enough. This is not
just a good performance. It is a theatrical experience.